The Ambit2 S watch has already won a Red Dot design award, keeping Suunto’s style and substance philosophy alive. As well as looking great, it’s comfy, not overly bulky and the five chromed buttons are easy to find and press without looking.
The watch has to be set up using Suunto’s user-friendly movescount.com website. Uploading is fast and once each ‘move’ (training session) is added, you can view basic data such as pace, speed and elevation graphs, as well as a pace bar chart and lap comparison.
Scrolling through the graphs moves a cursor around your route on the excellent map, and there are loads of other features to play with too, from training plans to a route planner.
The wide watch face can be set to white-on-black or black-on-white, with information spaced over three lines. You can programme up to eight screens, and the bottom line can flit between five outputs.
While the central line is nice and big, the smaller top and bottom ones are harder to read when you’re trying to catch a quick look. The unit can also take an age to find a GPS signal – an irritating wait, compounded by the way the Ambit2 displays its progress as a percentage, which often drops inexplicably back to single figures.
Pace is rounded to the nearest five seconds, which helps to avoid the jumpiness of more accurate readouts, and we found that data was accurately recorded. The comfy heart rate strap also provided consistent readings.
The Ambit2 S is a great training tool with a sophisticated look, but visibility of data on the round screen and a few teething problems mean it isn’t challenging for the GPS-watch top spot just yet.
This article was originally published in Triathlon Plus magazine, available on Zinio.